§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns information retrieval. In particular, the present invention concerns automated information retrieval for supplementing and improving content, such as online content.
§1.2 Related Information
Website publishers try to provide content that will be of particular interest to their users. In an attempt to provide rich, deep, and up-to-date access to information, this routinely involves manually gathering and periodically editing related content (or links to related content) which may be of particular interest to their users. It's challenging for Website publishers to manage the selection and presentation of additional content related to their Web page and Website visitors. Yet, it is highly desirable to provide such information in order to help keep users at their Website (e.g., to have a so-called “sticky” Website).
One way to identify contextually related news, images, searches, Web pages, blogs, RSS feeds, audio clips, videos clips, etc. (“related content”), is to analyze the particular content of the individual page manually. For example, a publisher of a news Website writing about Apple Computer may place a hand-edited collection of news links about Apple alongside their article for readers who want more information. Unfortunately this process is cumbersome, manual and difficult to scale with large amounts of new, and changes to existing, content and resources.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/748,870 (referred to as “the '870 application” and incorporated herein by reference), filed on Dec. 29, 2003, titled “IDENTIFYING RELATED INFORMATION GIVEN CONTENT AND/OR PRESENTING RELATED INFORMATION IN ASSOCIATION WITH CONTENT-RELATED ADVERTISEMENTS,” and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Krishna Bharat and Paul Buchheit as inventors describes techniques for providing, on target content, additional content related to the target content. The target content might be past search queries, news articles, reviews, weather, a set of ads, etc. However, the techniques described in the '870 application could be improved.
Contextual advertising systems can analyze a Web page's contents and provide advertisements that are related. Examples of contextual advertising are described in U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 10/314,427 (referred to as “the '427 application” and incorporated herein by reference), titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR SERVING RELEVANT ADVERTISEMENTS”, filed on Dec. 6, 2002 and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik and Paul Buchheit as inventors; and 10/375,900 (referred to as “the '900 application” and incorporated by reference), titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT,” filed on Feb. 26, 2003 and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Buchheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik, Deepak Jindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors. These applications describe methods and apparatus for serving ads relevant to the content of a document, such as a Web page for example.
Advertising systems and components thereof that consider user location are described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/654,265 (referred to as “the '265 application” and incorporated herein by reference), filed on Sep. 3, 2003, titled “DETERMINING AND/OR USING LOCATION INFORMATION IN AN AD SYSTEM”, and listing Leslie Yeh, Sridhar Ramaswarmi, and Zhe Qian as inventors
Advertising systems and components thereof that consider user information are described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/452,791 (referred to as “the '791 application” and incorporated herein by reference), filed on Jun. 2, 2003, titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS USING USER REQUEST INFORMATION AND USER INFORMATION”, and listing Krishna Bharat, Steve Lawrence, Mehran Sahami, and Amit Singhal as inventors; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/610,322 (referred to as “the '322 application” and incorporated herein by reference), filed on Jun. 30, 2003, titled “RENDERING ADVERTISEMENTS WITH DOCUMENTS HAVING ONE OR MORE TOPICS USING USER TOPIC INTEREST INFORMATION”, and listing Krishna Bharat as the inventor; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/750,363 (referred to as “the '363 application” and incorporated herein by reference), filed on Dec. 31, 2003, titled “GENERATING USER INFORMATION FOR USE IN TARGETED ADVERTISING” and listing Krishna Bharat, Steve Lawrence, and Mehran Sahami as inventors; and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/955,828 (referred to as “the '828 application” and incorporated herein by reference), filed on Sep. 30, 2004, titled “DETERMINING ADVERTISEMENTS USING USER BEHAVIOR INFORMATION SUCH AS PAST NAVIGATION INFORMATION” and listing David Bau as the inventor.
Although contextual advertising systems provide ads related to the content of a Web page or document (and/or to a user location, and/or to a particular user), ads are specifically commercial, and the benefit may be skewed toward the advertiser and Web publisher, and away from the end-user, particularly in systems that use offer information (e.g., offer per ad impression, maximum offer per ad impression, offer per ad selection, maximum offer per ad selection, offer per ad conversion, maximum offer per ad conversion, etc.) to make decisions about which ads to serve and how to serve them.
Further, in contextual advertising systems, ads are normally targeted using targeting information expressly entered by the advertiser (e.g., using keywords or categories). However, Web page publishers often want to provide related content that, unlike targeted advertisements, might not include information entered and used expressly for targeting.
The AdSense advertising network by Google at least takes end user utility into consideration. Specifically, it considers selection rates (click-through rates) when scoring ads competing in an arbitration (e.g., an auction). However, since partner Web publishers participating in the AdSense advertising network share a portion of advertising proceeds, price information (e.g., offers) associated with various ads still impacts which ads are to be rendered with a Web page, as well as how such ads are to be rendered (e.g., ordering).
In view of the foregoing, it would be useful to help Web publishers to provide useful related content, or links thereto, on their Websites and Web pages. It would be particularly useful if providing such related content required little Web publisher work, both initially, and on an on-going basis. Thus, it would be useful for the means for providing additional content to be easy for Web publishers to implement and maintain. It would be useful if such related content did not need to have information expressly entered for purposes of targeting it. It would be useful if the provision of such related content were not affected, at least directly, by interests in monetization. Finally, it would be useful if the source of the related content were a trusted and reliable entity, with the technical sophistication to provide useful, relevant (e.g., up-to-date), content.